The City Rebooted

The following sections are included:

• Endorsement for The City Rebooted
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables

As the COVID-19 pandemic entered its fourth year, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on May 5, “With great hope, I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency” (World Health Organization 2023a). According to WHO’s Coronavirus Dashboard on the same day, the cumulative cases worldwide stood at 765,222,293, with nearly seven million deaths (World Health Organization 2023b)…

In the feverish early days of the pandemic, when people scrambled to stay indoors, and work-from-home became the norm, many believed that city centres globally would face a “donut effect” wherein activities would shift out of the city centre and into surrounding areas (Ramani and Bloom 2021). This prompted important questions about the fate of the city centre, a space which has long held a sacrosanct position for the cardinal functions it performs. Who is using the city centre now, and which players have left? Where are social and economic activities taking place at present? Will the city centre remain relevant post-COVID-19?…

The COVID-19 pandemic was a catalyst that moved work, commerce, and social relations into the digital space. In the wake of the pandemic, Singaporeans were advised to work from home and limit social interactions. This caused internet traffic to increase by as much as 60% (Wong 2020), while the number of contactless payments through payment services such as PayNow doubled (Yong 2021). As people struggled to avoid physical contact, digital innovation in the private sector accelerated to meet the growing demand for contactless communication and transactions. Traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses supplemented their storefront locations with online services through digital platforms; general practitioners (GPs) offered telemedicine for patients in home recovery, and employers adopted new routines and means of communication to facilitate remote work. By some estimates, the value of the consumer and business adoptions of digital solutions in the first month of the pandemic was equal to the adoption usually seen over a five-year period (Baig et al. 2020). Although safe-distancing restrictions were gradually lifted, and life slowly returned to normal, new digital technology and online habits permanently changed the digital economy in which we work and do commerce…

In their highly provocative book, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present (2015), Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Shumon Basar explored the impact of the internet and social media on our world. In their work, technology is viewed as transformative, and in many cases, destructive. These effects happen gradually, almost imperceptibly at a tectonic level, only to demonstrate their full impact when major shifts happen, highlighting the resultant aggregate societal change — hence the “earthquake” metaphor. They write, “The unintended side effects of technology dictate our future.” (Basar, Coupland, and Obrist 2015, 174). The trope of technology as a malevolent transformer has been widely echoed by the subsequent profound change in society over the last two decades across the gamut of social, political, and cultural lives…

The following sections are included:

• INTRODUCTION
• SOCIAL INTERACTIONS AND THE WORKPLACE
• HYBRID: ALTERNATIVE WORKPLACE MODELS AND “GOLDILOCKS” SOLUTIONS
• MEASURING OFFICE NETWORKS
• MODELLING HYBRID WORKING
• ANALYSIS AND METRICS
• RESULTS
• KEY FINDINGS
• MAPPING SCENARIOS
• RECOMMENDATIONS
• CONCLUSIONS
• REFERENCES

The following sections are included:

• INTRODUCTION
• SINGAPORE’S REGIONAL CENTRE CONCEPT
• TRANSPORT NETWORKS, CONNECTIVITY AND TRAVEL PATTERNS IN REGIONAL CENTRES
• REGIONAL CENTRES BEYOND FUNCTIONALITY: PLACE IDENTITY, SOCIAL CAPITAL, AND ROOTEDNESS
• CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES

Cloud kitchens and cloud stores have been popping up across Singapore in the last five years as part of the rise of on-demand food and grocery delivery services. Yet, this is taking place beyond the consciousness of many, even though these cloud operations are located near population centres, where their clienteles are. This mirrors the shift in consumer behaviour and the proliferation of cloud kitchens and cloud stores in many North American and European cities, popularised by global technology companies like Uber, Deliveroo, and DoorDash (Singh 2019). In Britain, this trend has also coincided with the gradual demise of brick-and-mortar restaurants and retail stores in their cities and high streets (Suliman 2019). Would this be repeated in Singapore?…

The pandemic, with all its concomitant pandemonium and disruption, also brought with it an uncanny sense of lull and an uneasy silence in the city. The daily rhythms of life were thrown into disarray; the past felt hazily distant and the future felt remotely obscure. We found ourselves in a state of liminality, at the intersection of transient and conflicting events and identities, clumsily navigating the topographies of everyday life…

According to Liu Thai Ker, the renowned Singapore architect and urban planner, foreign visitors to Singapore always say to him, “I love visiting Singapore.” He would ask them, “Why?” “Because everything works here,” was the invariable reply (Chan 2021). The reaction of the visitors sums up the appeal and success of Singapore as a global city and a liveable city…

The following sections are included:

• CITY CENTRES’ PURPOSE, PITFALLS, AND PROSPECTS
• THE PANDEMIC CITY
• MAGIC OF THE CITY CENTRE
• A TALE OF THREE PLACES
• PUEBLOS MÁGICOS, MEXICO CITY
• KOTA TUA, JAKARTA
• TIONG BAHRU, SINGAPORE
• PLANNING MAGIC?
• THE MAGIC OF SPATIAL COMPENSATION
• CONCLUSION
• ANNEX
• ENDNOTES
• REFERENCES

The following sections are included:

• Epilogue
• Index